ZOE FITZGERALD CARTER
When my mother killed herself, I thought, Finally! I can relax.
No more worrying, anticipating, or trying to talk her out of it. No more tense discussions about sleeping pills or helium or morphine. No more wrapping my mind around a “death date” only to have her abruptly change it when she realized she wasn’t quite ready to go. No more flights back and forth across the country with my two small children or—even worse—without them.
For months, my primary job had been to help my mother plot her escape from advanced Parkinson’s. So when she finally got down to it and stopped eating and drinking on the first hot day of July 2001, and died ten days later, it seemed like I had traversed the apocalypse and survived it. The most planned, discussed, delayed, and fought over death in the history of mankind had finally transpired. I was sad, of course, but mainly I was exhausted and spent.
I was also frantic to pick up the missing pieces of my “real life,” much of which I could barely recall. After a hastily assembled memorial service, a final good-bye to the termite-riddled childhood home in D.C., I returned to Northern California, determined to get down to it. Make up for lost time.
I threw myself into volunteering at my younger daughter’s preschool. I picked up the threads of a novel I’d been writing a year earlier. I bicycled like a lunatic up the steep, winding roads into the Berkeley hills. I tried to remember who my husband was and why I had married him.
For a week or so, I was a whirlwind of released energies. Churning out words, flying down hills, staying up late, driving the carpool, having sex, throwing parties, and playing music. No more waiting for the phone to ring with my mother’s pinched voice on the other end proposing yet another day—another way—to die. No more lying on the couch all morning because to commit to any one activity was to invite interruption: a call from a doctor or a caretaker; another conversation about death.
Everything was back on track, I thought, cooking up hearty dinners for my daughters and husband, playing my long-neglected guitar. Strapping on my bike cleats and grabbing my helmet for yet another ride, I reveled in my newly awakened muscles, the growing wingspan of my lungs.
And then the whole construct came to a skidding, tire-rolling, helmet-flying halt. But it wasn’t my bike that crashed. It was my body.
First there was a freaky eyesight thing that made me think I was going blind. A vague, difficult-to-define disturbance in my vision that started a month or two after my mother’s death. It danced like a vibrating cloud across my eyes. A thin, shimmering curtain between me and the world that made me feel permanently stoned—or half asleep.
I tried to ignore it. Will it away. Mind over eyeballs, or tumor, or whatever it was that had moved into my frontal lobes like an unruly guest. But walking with my children along the Berkeley waterfront one day, our blond terrier mutt running ahead of us, I noticed that it had gotten worse. There was now a contrail effect. I turned my head to search for the dog, and for a second, the image of the trail bled into the image of her running along the beach, creating an arty double exposure effect.
Terrified, I forced myself to keep chatting with my eight-year-old, who skipped happily beside me; to hold tightly to my four-year-old’s hand, slowing my pace to match hers as we moved down the path, squinting to protect my brain from the glittery, painful sunlight reflecting off the bay.
I just wanted to be normal; to be a nice, normal woman enjoying her life with her husband and children. Homework, soccer practice, dinner with friends, writing, cooking, walking the dog.
But I was not normal, I was going blind. Waking up in the middle of the night in a fearful, acrid sweat, I would lie there wondering: If I was a character in a novel, would this strange eye malady be a metaphor? A cosmic joke? Or just bad luck?
Maybe if I could figure that out, it would leave me alone.
Then came the tics. They would start in my left eyebrow, move down my arm, and pop up, especially at night, in my calves. Then a random, searing pain radiating across the left side of my upper back like an evil sprouting wing. And just to keep things lively, there were dizzy spells, stomachaches, night sweats, and insomnia.
Having been exceptionally healthy my whole life, I felt like I had entered the twilight zone. My formerly peaceful nights were now dogged by wakefulness and primal fears. I feverishly wondered if my mother’s death had infected me; if her sickness and despair had leached itself into my flesh while I slept beside her. I told myself I was an idiot. That none of my symptoms, with the exception of a possible brain tumor, were even serious. They were just annoying, transitory spasms. This too would pass.
These stern self-lectures were invariably followed by images of my children growing up without a mother, my husband finding a new wife, and the bed would turn into a thrashing sea of twisted sheets and anxiety.
Mornings were better. I stayed off the computer for a few days and my eyes got a little better. The contrail vanished and the veil retreated to the periphery like in a hazy-edged antique photograph. But then, in the midst of a steep climb on my bike, I grew dizzy and breathless. My heart began to erratically bump and thrash in my chest. Steady one moment, pounding like a motherfucker the next.
Arrhythmia, my young male cardiologist, Dr. Wu, told me. Lone incident unless it becomes chronic. Could be hereditary. Could be hormones. Drink less coffee. Drink less alcohol. Control stress. See you in six months.
WHAT? Control my stress when my heart—my heart, the thing solely responsible for keeping me alive—has an uncontrolled glitch? How does one stay calm when one’s pulse sounds like a wacked-out metronome (boom-BOOM–budubudu-BOOM), Dr. Wu? Really?
I did not go back to see Dr. Wu. Nor did I stop drinking. I was frankly too stressed to do either of those things. Which could explain why I had a headache more days than not. The pain was never terrible, more of a low-grade grumble than a full-on roar, but I found myself hoarding Advil, irrationally afraid that I would find myself in a remote location without a Rite Aid or CVS. I stashed bottles of it in my purse, in my bathroom, in the glove compartment of my car—even in the little pouch on the back of my bike. As long as I had those milky brown pellets nearby I was okay.
But I was not okay. And the idea that my body might be falling apart for a reason had started to dawn on me. Maybe this lurid array of symptoms really were a metaphor or a message or a secret code that I was just too stupid or stressed out to crack. I even suspected that my physical breakdown was connected to my mother and the traumatic way she had departed this earth. But I was too busy going to doctors’ appointments to think very deeply about it.
There was the ophthalmologist who told me I probably had a bad case of eyestrain—either that or a neurological disease. The neurologist who told me that I did not have a neurological disease but couldn’t explain my vision issues. The crisp, overworked primary care doc who sent me off for a CT scan to see if my headaches were caused by sinusitis. They were not.
None of these doctors had anything helpful to say. Apparently, I was as much a mystery to them as to myself. My days were now spent tracking symptoms, going to doctors, surfing the web, and diagnosing myself with everything from ALS to cancer. I grew fractured, distracted, and miserable. I stopped calling my friends or playing my guitar. When my husband reached for me in bed, I pulled away, curling tightly into myself, wanting to be alone with my fears, my inch-by-inch body scans.
The final straw was when I walked my dog in a wooded park at the top of the Berkeley Hills and brushed my shins against a branch of poison oak. Instead of the usual constellation of itchy blisters that quickly faded, both shins turned into a pulpy, oozing mass from the knees down. My legs were literally weeping. And the blisters, rather than receding, crept upward. One day I itched my left arm and the spot blistered and turned red. Another patch popped up on my stomach. Afraid to scratch myself, I was plagued with itching. My left ear! The back of my right knee! My skin teased and tortured me, revolting in every sense of the word.
And so, on a fine spring afternoon, I lay sobbing on the bathroom floor, trying and failing to tape thick sheets of white gauze over my weeping shins. My body was coming apart at the seams. From eyes to ankles. From the outer layer to the inner cavities. From my tweaked back to my unsteady heart.
I was furious at my own powerlessness, just as I had been when my mother would not stop talking about killing herself. I was furious at her for not being there. Not only in that moment, but for all the moments to come. I needed her to listen to me, goddamnit—to care about my problems for a change.
With something akin to horror, I realized how perfectly I had recreated my own trauma: the helplessness, the fear, even the endless doctors’ appointments. After that brief interlude of joyous reconnection, I had slipped right back into a familiar universe of dis-ease: isolated and ashamed of the dismal place I inhabited. (Enumerating physical symptoms was no more attractive than discussing my soon-to-be-dead mother.)
Only this time I had only myself to blame because there is really no blaming a dead woman.
In my memory, that was the day Dr. H’s receptionist called and the universe, which had been fucking with me for weeks—smirking nastily from the sidelines while I flailed and spluttered and took on water—unexpectedly threw me a lifeline.
I had heard about Dr. H from my friend Mary, a Buddhist therapist who shared my bristling distrust of mainstream medicine. According to Mary, Doctor H was scary smart and totally unorthodox. She would “run your pulses,” do muscle testing, and give you Chinese herbs. Best of all, she could diagnose conditions that other doctors missed or were stymied by.
Excited—and desperate—I had called her office only to find that she wasn’t taking patients. Listlessly, I had left my name on her waitlist, not expecting to hear back. But then, months later, while I lay crying on the bathroom floor, my legs oozing in sympathy, her receptionist called to see if I was still interested. I was.
From the moment I arrived, it was clear Dr. H did things a little differently. The small, messy waiting room was covered with scarves and potholders to raise money for Charlotte Maxwell, a breast cancer clinic in Oakland that offers alternative treatments to underprivileged women. Dr. H herself came out to collect me, a tiny, grey-haired woman in a colorful Guatemalan shirt. She had bright blue eyes and a distinct, but not unattractive, beard on her round cheeks.
Without preamble, she took me into her cramped, equally messy office. Plopping herself behind a small wooden desk, she poured herself a glass of water and asked me what was going on. As I began to talk, I felt myself relax. There was none of the usual shuffling of papers, the barely hidden impatience, the sense that my issues were too diffuse or unrelated or just bizarre to consider. There was only curiosity, questions, and more questions. About my symptoms, but also my life: Who did I live with, what did I eat, what events may have precipitated my health crises?
At some point, she had me get on to her patient’s table where she took my blood pressure, looked at my tongue, and had me repeatedly raise my arm while she pressed down on it, simultaneously touching various parts of my body. “Energy testing,” she said, unapologetically. “It works.”
Back at her desk, she gave me the verdict: “Your liver is sluggish, your nervous system is overloaded, and your ability to deal with stress of any kind is severely compromised. The tics, the muscle spasms, the headaches, the arrhythmia—even the poison oak—it’s all part of the same thing.”
Looking across her desk at me, her expression was sympathetic but not in a pitying “poor you” way. More in a “things happen and you deal with them” way. Kindly, but matter of fact. I found it immensely comforting.
“You need to grieve for your mother,” she said, scribbling things on a sheet of paper as she spoke. “Write. Meditate. Walk. Bike—keep biking! The arrhythmias aren’t going to kill you. Think of them as information. Your body is talking to you, letting you know it’s stressed. You need to listen to it. You’re going to be fine. You’re young and healthy. We just need to get you back into balance.”
She wrote out several pages of instructions. Everything from cutting out wheat and dairy (“Just for now, while we build up your threshold”) to taking a Chinese supplement called Freeing the Moon to deep breathing and meditation. Then she referred me to a local homeopath and an acupuncturist, both of them women, both of them close colleagues of hers, and told me to come back in six weeks.
Sitting outside in my car, I cried and then I laughed and then I stared at a neon-lit nail salon trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. For the first time in weeks, I felt a deep sense of hope and relief. I was not dying or having a nervous breakdown. I was not crazy or stupid.
I would follow the instructions Dr H gave me, both that day and at many appointments to come, and I would eventually get better. I would also read books with titles like When The Body Says No and Why People Don’t Heal and realize that there is a whole science behind the physical expression of trauma, stress, and unexpressed grief. And then I would get angry all over again at the way most doctors see us as a single symptom or, at best, a compilation of symptoms, not as holistic organisms.
But one thing I knew for sure that day: I had received far more than good medical advice; I had received the gift of being fully seen. Not just for the malfunctioning parts of my body but also for the sad, neglected parts of my being. The unacknowledged emotion that had been willfully tossing up symptoms like a tantruming child.
For the first time in years, I felt mothered.
I laughed with the obviousness of it. And then I cried again. My mother had stopped mothering me years before she died and that was perhaps the greater grief, even greater than her death. The huge, layered rock that I had been dragging around with me, cumbersome but manageable. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
But thanks to Dr. H, I could begin to break it apart. To chip away at the pieces, let them crumble and roll away.
I wondered, briefly, if Dr. H would consider adopting me.
There were, of course, no miracle cures. But within a few weeks of that first appointment, many of my symptoms began to disappear. First my eye issues resolved, then my headaches receded. I came to realize that the arrhythmias were at least partially connected to the wine I was drinking and I gave it up.
Most importantly, I learned to grieve for my mother. To toast her at my family table, to visit her grave, and even to write a book about her. To forgive her for the ways she had not mothered me and remember the ways she had.
Thirteen years later, none of those particular symptoms have reappeared. There are still times when my body talks, but these days I know enough to listen. Although Dr. H retired a few years ago, I have found other wise and loving women to help me decipher that language; the way it often expresses our deepest needs.
When I think of those days, I can still perfectly recall the fear and frustration of dealing with my imploding body. But what I remember most clearly are the blissful moments when I lay on various tables—Dr. H’s, the acupuncturist, the homeopath, all of them women, all of them older than me—and answered their gentle questions, felt their sympathetic hands on my forehead or on my aching back: their soft mother hands on my skin. And my spirit began to heal.